LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Arkansas won’t award any delegates to a lawyer running against President Barack Obama in Tuesday’s primary, despite predictions that he could pull significant support in a state where the president is unpopular, the state Democratic Party announced Thursday.

Party spokeswoman Candace Martin said John Wolfe hasn’t complied with Arkansas’ delegate selection rules and hasn’t turned in two mandatory documents. Martin said the national party has told the Arkansas Democratic Party that delegates Wolfe might claim won’t be recognized at the national convention.

“The national Democratic Party has informed us that Mr. Wolfe isn’t a candidate who’s been participating in good faith. He’s been completely noncompliant with the Arkansas delegate selection plan,” Martin said in an interview with The Associated Press, the party’s first public acknowledgement that Wolfe wouldn’t be entitled to delegates.

Wolfe missed deadlines to certify an authorized representative for his campaign in the state and to provide a necessary statement of participation to the state party, Martin said. The Louisiana Democratic Party last month refused to award Wolfe any delegates for the same reason, despite him winning 12 percent of the vote in that state’s primary.

Wolfe, who filed paperwork with the state on March 1 and paid a $2,500 filing fee, blasted the party’s decision.

“The people of Arkansas will speak, and if they want to disenfranchise the people who vote for John Wolfe it’ll be a terrible reflection on the Democratic Party nationally and in Arkansas,” Wolfe said.

Wolfe could win a significant amount of the vote in Arkansas, where Obama remains deeply unpopular. The president hasn’t visited the state since 2006, before he was a candidate, and many of the state’s top Democrats have said he has little to no chance here in November. Obama lost Arkansas by 20 points to Republican nominee John McCain in the 2008 general election.

Wolfe has said he’s running because he believes the president hasn’t been progressive enough, but he and other Democratic candidates are attracting votes in conservative states.

Keith Judd, who is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas for making threats at the University of New Mexico in 1999, won 41 percent of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary earlier this month. In Oklahoma, anti-abortion protester Randall Terry got 18 percent of the primary vote in March.

Before Thursday’s decision, Wolfe would have been allowed to compete for delegates if he had won at least 15 percent of the vote in Arkansas’ primary.